Rebel Voices
Page 52
WHO SAID A LOGGER LIVES?
The question has often been asked: “What constitutes living?” If it is the mere fact that we have life in our bodies and are plodding along in search of a job with our blankets on our back, then we are all living.
If “living” means to have all the good things of life, all the comforts of a home, and a life guarantee that such comforts shall continue as long as we are willing to do our share of the work, then we are not living, but simply saving funeral expenses.
It is estimated that there are 50,000 loggers along the Pacific coast, and it is a conservative statement to make that not one percent of them can say that their home consists of anything better than a dirty bunk furnished by the boss and a roll of blankets that they are compelled to tote about from pillar to post, many times only to make room for another toiler who has left $2 for the job in the tender care of a fat Employment Hog, who will divvy up with the foreman or superintendent. This is incentive enough to soon discharge him, so that a new recruit can be divorced from his $2, and so this endless chain of men tramping to and from the employment shark and the job.
Do They Drink?
Sure they drink. That is, the most of them do. Saloon keepers have waxed fat from the scanty earnings of the lumberjack. The saloonman knows when every pay day is in every camp in his neighborhood. He also knows that the lumberjack will bring his blankets into the saloon for safe keeping until he has a look about the burg and buys another job. The saloon is the only home he has, and there are to be generally found his friends from other camps, who are, of course, always glad to see him. Then the check has to be cashed, which is considered a favor, and the lumberjack reciprocates by buying a drink “for the house,” which means all hands, if the gang is not too large. The saloonman is also glad to meet the new arrival with the check, and he too does the honors by “setting them up.” Sometimes the checks do not admit of a large “blow-in,” as the two-by-four (time check) was administered before a “stake” was made. In parts of Montana this employment ticket graft is “worked to a frazzle.” There are camps that are known to have three crews of men. One crew coming to the camps with the “tickets for a job”; another with a two-by-four going away, and the other crew at work in the woods producing 20 times more for the boss than the wages could buy back at night. When men are plentiful and the labor market is well stocked, then the employment shark reaps the harvest. If men are scarce and times are good (which means lots of hard slavery) the boss generally tries to “hang onto” his crew after he has selected a good, sound, husky bunch. He can’t afford to monkey with the “divvy on the employment ticket” then, as there is much more money to be made in keeping a full crew.
Checks for 5 Cents
Pay checks have been issued to first-class lumberjacks in Montana by no smaller a corporation than Jim Hill’s railway, for amounts ranging from 5 cents and up; scores of them for amounts less than $1. The reader will doubt this statement and immediately say that it would be almost impossible to figure a man’s time down so fine. Not so. This check may represent all the cash a worker will receive after working four or five days and perhaps longer. The employment fees in these particular cases are deducted from the wages earned, as in hard times the men have not the money to put up to the “HOG” in advance. Then there is the dollar for the doctor and hospital. (There is generally no hospital and the doctor could not pare a corn.) Poll tax must be paid, which is generally about $4, if it has not been paid at some other camp, and if the worker loses his receipt, he pays again. Spring mattresses are on sale generally, and as they are fixtures to the bunk, they have to be paid for. The next fellow buys them over again. Boots, rubbers, socks, tobacco, etc., are for sale by the benevolent company at double their town value, and, of course, the woodsmen must have clothes and tobacco. It is now easy to understand how a man could be paid off with a nickle, 15 cents, 31 cents, etc. After all the grafts are worked and deducted from the wages due, the bank check represents the balance due.
Every employer of labor in the camps does not work the graft for all it is worth, but the employment shark graft is quite general, as is also the doctor.
The Food
The food is generally of the coarsest kind. Although not the fault of the cook, as many of the camp cooks are of the best in the land. Good butter is a rare article in a logging camp. Some of it is as white as wax, and as rotten as a putrid carcass, if smell goes for anything. This brand of “Ole,” as the men call it, is very cheap, but strong. Strength is what the boss wants.
Industrial Worker, December 26, 1912.
A lumberjack in Montana put some butter on the railroad track (so the story goes) and the train was derailed.
The “main squirt,” or superintendent, occasionally visits the camp and eats with HIS MEN. He pronounces the food fine, especially the butter, and shows how tough he is by plastering it good and thick on the bread. He generally takes to the timber or the automobile immediately after supper.
Environment
The environment in which the lumberjack as logger lives is anything but a pleasant one. It consists of working long hours, eating poor food, sleeping in overcrowded bunk-houses, which are alive with vermin (lice and fleas), being robbed by Employment Hogs, packing the blankets, and having to leave them in the saloon in town, where many call home. From the toil of these men a few have made millions and live in the palatial mansions in the cities. The streets are named after them, and they are generally the leading citizens. They have their automobiles and their yachts, and to say the least, they revel in luxury. When the logger has produced more logs than can be sold or consumed, he is immediately laid off until a demand is created. The boss calls this “CURTAILING PRODUCTION,” and the lumberjack calls it H—L. If a machine can be procured that will get out twice as many logs as men and donkey engines, with the same sized crew, in it goes. The “flying machine” does this very thing and it was only this year that thousands of men were laid off for a month at a stretch on Hoquiam Harbor to satisfy the great productivity of the “flying machine.” The boss got rich, as the “flying machine” drew no wages, and did not need feeding when standing idle. The workers got poor, because the boss did not want them to work. They had by long hours of labor, together with some working man’s invention, worked themselves out on the street.
The boss logger is organized to control the price of logs and lumber. Whether times be good or times be hard he has a cinch on the situation.
The slave logger is not organized to control that which he has to sell to the boss—HIS LABOR POWER. No effort has been made to shorten the hours of labor. No organized effort has been made to rid themselves of the “EMPLOYMENT HOG.” Thousands of loggers are buffetted about on the sea of capitalism with their blankets on their back, having no other purpose in life than to be “looking for jobs,” and thus satisfying the greedy man or a few parasites who have by hook or crook gotten control of one of the natural resources of the earth, which was provided by Nature for the common use of mankind.
If we are agreed that the forests were intended for mankind and not for the enrichment of a few gluttons, then it is up to the loggers and all workers employed in the lumbering industry to wake up and organize right, so that they may at least live.
Let us begin by getting an eight-hour work day and tying a can to the employment shark. It is up to the workers to do the curtailing by doing less work each day. There is only one union that is really worthy of the name of a “labor organization” in America. It is founded on the truth—THE CLASS STRUGGLE. The irrepressible conflict between the toilers and the parasites; between those who own the tools and do not use them, and those who use them and do not own them. Between master and slave. Join your union today and take an interest in the work of getting all together. It’s your duty. Do it. If there is not a local of your industry in your nearest town, then start one. If you don’t know how to start one just ask the “INDUSTRIAL WORKER,” or the first I.W.W. secretary you can locate.
A LOGGER
2
Covington Hall (1871-ca. 1951), who often wrote under the pen name Covington Ami or Covami, was one of the most prolific of the I.W.W. writers. He was born in Mississippi, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a wealthy southern belle. For more than fifty years, he was active as a writer, speaker, and publicity agent in farmer-labor struggles. He began as a follower of William Jennings Bryan, took an active part in many strenuous political campaigns, and for several years was one of the Farmers’ Non-Partisan League’s publicity chiefs.
Covington Hall edited The Lumberjack (Alexandria, Louisiana), published by the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, Southern District. The Lumberjack was later published in Portland, Oregon, as the Voice of the People. Hall also edited Rebellion, a little monthly magazine of radical essays and poetry. “Us the Hoboes and the Dreamers,” which Covington said was written during the strike of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas in 1911–12, appeared in Rebellion (June 1916). It was one of his most popular and frequently reprinted poems.
US THE HOBOES AND DREAMERS
By COVINGTON HALL
Written when we Lumberjacks, Sodbusters, Hoboes and Dreamers were fighting the Lumber Barons of Louisiana and Texas, with our backs to the wall, back in 1910–14.
We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the South in awe,
We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law;
We shall come up from our shanties to your burdened banquet hall,—
We shall turn your wine to wormwood, your honey into gall.
We shall go where wail the children, where, from your Race-killing mills,
Flows a bloody stream of profits to your curst, insatiate tills;
We shall tear them from your drivers, in our shamed and angered pride,
In the fierce and frenzied fury of a fatherhood denied.
We shall set our sisters on you, those you trapt into your hells
Where the mother instinct’s stifled and no earthly beauty dwells;
We shall call them from the living death, the death of life you gave,
To sing our class’s triumph o’er your cruel system’s grave.
We shall hunt around the fences where your oxmen sweat and gape,
Till they stampede down your stockades in their panic to escape;
We shall steal up thru the darkness, we shall prowl the wood and town,
Till they waken to their power and arise and ride you down.
We shall send the message to them, on a whisper down the night,
And shall cheer as warrior women drive your helots to the fight;
We shall use your guile against you, all the cunning you have taught,
All the wisdom of the serpent to attain the ending sought.
We shall come as comes the cyclone,—in the stillness we shall form—
From the calm your terror fashioned we shall hurl on you the storm;
We shall strike when least expected, when you deem Toil’s route complete,
And crush you and your gunmen ‘neath our brogan-shodded feet.
We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the South in awe,
We shall trample on your customs, we shall spit upon your law;
We shall outrage all your temples, we shall blaspheme all your gods,—
We shall turn your Slavepen over as the plowman turns the clods!
3
In 1912, Bill Haywood toured several of the lumber camps in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas as part of a trip south which included speaking at the 1912 convention of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Alexandria, Louisiana. This account of his observations appeared in the International Socialist Review (August 1912).
TIMBER WORKERS AND TIMBER WOLVES
By WILLIAM D. HAYWOOD
A. L. Emerson, President of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, is in jail at Lake Charles, La. He was arrested following the shooting at Grabow, La., where three union men and one company hireling were killed outright and nearly two score of men were more or less seriously wounded.
The shooting is the outcome of the bitter war waged against the members of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers by the Lumber Trust for the last eighteen months. The scene of the tragedy that occurred on Sunday, July seventh, is a typical Southern lumber camp. The mill at this place is operated by the Galloway Lumber Company. In common with all others, it is surrounded by the miserable houses where the workers find habitation, the commissary store of the Company being the largest place of business in the town. A strike has been on at this place since the middle of last May. The single demand on the part of the union men was for a bi-weekly pay day. Heretofore the pay days have been at long intervals—usually a month apart.
I.W.W. Hall in Everett, Washington, 1916.
During the intervening weeks, when the men were in need of money to meet the necessities of life, they could secure advances on their pay but not in real money. They were compelled to accept Company Scrip payable only in merchandise and exchangeable only at the company commissary. If accepted elsewhere it is uniformly discounted from 10 to 25 per cent on the dollar.
In the commissary stores where the cash prices are always from 20 to 50 per cent higher than at the independent stores, the company has established another means of graft by making two prices—the coupon or scrip price being much higher than that exacted for real cash.
The conditions at Grabow can be used as an illustration of nearly all of the other lumber camps of the South.
The commissary store is not the only iniquity imposed upon the Timber Workers. For miserable shacks they are compelled to pay exorbitant rents; sewerage there is none; there is no pretense at sanitation; the outhouses are open vaults. For these accommodations families pay from $5 to $20 a month. In one camp worn-out box cars are rented by R. A. Long, the Kansas City philanthropist, for $4 a month. Insurance fees are arbitrarily collected from every worker, for which he receives practically nothing in return, but whether his time be long or short—one day or a month—with the company, the fee is deducted. The same is true of the doctor fee and the hospital fee, which, in all places, is an imaginary institution. The nearest thing to a hospital that the writer saw was an uncompleted foundation at De Ridder, the place visited a few days prior to the Grabow tragedy. The gunmen and deputy sheriffs are an expensive innovation in the manufacture of lumber. These miserable tools are to be found everywhere and are used to browbeat and coerce the workers.
The lumber crews are hired without regard to color or nationality. In building up the Brotherhood of Timber Workers the officials of that organization have followed the lines laid down by the bosses and have brought into the ranks such persons as the bosses have employed. With wisdom and forethought they have refused to allow a discordant note to cause dissension in their ranks. This spirit of class consciousness aroused the ire of the lumber company to such an extent that no member of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers or the Industrial Workers of the World is given employment.
The spirit of the organization was plainly shown in its recent convention held at Alexandria where an effort was made on the part of the authorities to prevent a joint convention of white and black members. The Democratic officials of the county threatened to have an injunction issued or some other process of law invoked to prevent the body from coming together. As there is no law in Louisiana that prohibits the mixing of the races on the job, the B. of T. W. could not understand why they should not confer and council with each other in convention about their daily work, it being the purpose of the organization to improve the conditions under which its members labor.
After the Alexandria Convention adjourned, the first effort of the Timber Workers was to establish the semimonthly pay day at Grabow. The demand was made of the company that pay day should come every two weeks. The demand was flatly refused and the strike followed and has continued since. The Galloway Lumber Company, the concern affected, tried to operate th
eir mill in the meantime with non-union men who had been induced to fill some of the places of the striking timber workers. It was for the purpose of bringing these men into the organization that President Emerson, accompanied by a hundred or more members and sympathizers from De Ridder, went to Grabow.
While Emerson was addressing the crowd that had assembled a shot was fired from the direction of the lumber company’s office, which struck a young man standing by his side. This shot seemed to be the signal for a fusilade, coming not only from the office but from barricades of lumber and from the houses occupied by company thugs, one of whom stepped to the door and fired a shot which lodged in the abdomen of Bud Hickman, a farmer, who with his wife in his buggy, was trying to get away from the conflict.
Arlington, Washington, branch of the Lumberworkers’ Industrial Union No. 500, December 1917.
Roy Martin and Gates Hall, two union men, were killed outright and A. W. Vincent, a company man, was also killed.
That the company was prepared and looking for an opportunity to make just such a murderous assault is evidenced by the fact that the office had been converted into an arsenal.
The first news received at New Orleans, which later reports seem to verify, was that managers, superintendents and gun-men from other lumber companies were ambushed in the Galloway Lumber Company office and that a wholesale slaughter of union men had been deliberately planned. That the murder of Emerson was intended is clearly shown by the fact that the man standing closest to him was the first shot down. Emerson was the desired victim. He had long been a target for the lumber barons’ hatred and venom.
Emerson is in jail, being held without bail at the time of this writing to await the action of the Grand Jury, that is to convene on the 15th of August. He is charged with murder on two counts. It will be proven in the course of time that his only crime is that of trying to lessen the burden and lengthen the lives of his fellow workers.